Chromebooks

It will be good in parts for business users – from SMBs to large enterprises, but could also stumble over some difficult problems. That is the view of James Peel, Product Manager at internet monitoring company, Opsview.

When it comes to managing large numbers of deployed Chromebooks there is a high potential for management problems, particularly because many of the applications and services that businesses use are themselves constructed from other applications, services and utilities already available online. Peel argues:

“ Chromebooks" are inevitably going to increase online traffic so monitoring service utilisation will be crucial. Without it users will not know whether a problem is caused by a network issue, a primary service failure or a service component sourced from a third party on the other side of the globe. Users need a clear picture of what services they are using.”

“ User experience will become far more important with Chromebooks.

The arrival of Chromebooks does open up the question of support for a business tool that is geared to totally online operation. This factor alone could prove to be an issue for larger enterprises. Many of them will not sanction the use of Google for storage – and with Chromebooks that won’t be just the storage of final, completed documents and files but also the intermediate saves that normal working entails. If they are not committing storage to Google they will either have to search very carefully for alternative storage service providers that meet their particular criteria, or get into the world of establishing significant private Cloud storage resources of their own.

Here, the availability of high bandwidth network infrastructure, both wired and WiFi, can open the possibility of Chromebooks becoming the de facto thin client for all staff.

“ I think this could be attractive to businesses.

One Cloud industry sector that could do particularly well from the Chromebooks approach is SaaS. Here we have a group of service providers that are specifically geared to conducting all processing and storage online and under central management control. I think giveaway Chromebook client systems could become a widespread marketing tool in the more common applications areas of SaaS, as well as the larger service aggregators as they develop and grow.

It complements many Cloud-base services extremely well.